The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder

by Richard Rohr

Progress is never a straight and uninterrupted line, but we have all been formed by the Western Philosophy of Progress that tells us it is, leaving us despairing and cynical.

Francis taught us, therefore, that the antidote to confusion and paralysis is always a return to simplicity, to what is actually right in front of us, to the nakedly obvious.

Modern people believe that things will only get better and better. This worldview has taken many surrogate forms and shaped all of us deeply, especially in the West.

Once we lose a sense of inherent value, we have lost all hope of encountering true value, much less the Holy. Even religious people, if they do not pray, will normally regress to an exchange-value reading of religion. It is no longer about the Great Mystery, mystic union, and transformation, but merely social order and control. Moral codes and priesthoods are enlisted for the sake of enforcement and some measure of civility. For many, if not most, Western Christians, it is basically a crime-and-punishment scenario, instead of the grace-and-mercy world that Jesus proclaims.

The whole Bible is about meeting God in the actual, in the incarnate moment, in the scandal of particularity, and not in educated theories—

Our goal ought to be a spirituality connected to this world in every aspect, seeing the Divine Light shining through the mundane, the ordinary, the physical, the material, the entire cosmos—and not only in the churchy, the correct, and the pure, which keeps the world split and contentious.